Material Components Discussion Thread

Nope, not possible!

Hey look, I created my first 'move a bunch of stuff to make a whole new thread' thread!

Just to simmer this on the back-burner a bit, lemme say this idea has been thought through to conclusion (though not created yet). Or at least I have thought it through to a conclusion I find doable and satisfying (after some discussions with Half-Knight) though of course people can still contribute ideas. Or make it a whole different way, for that matter

The idea is thus:

- Belt Pouch: wizards will start with, or be able to buy a belt pouch. One of the internal flags of the pouch will be set to 20 (or whatever number we agree on) and that is the number of consumable material components (as opposed to re-usable foci) left in the pouch.

The pouch will be usable as the Extraplanar Chest, in being able to be opened, hold stuff and retrieve stuff. Hence, the carrying of large numbers of material components will not detract from the inventory slots of characters. In any case, material components will not actually appear in the pouch: just the foci. (This is due to the problems of trying to access the pouch during spell-casting, which is a whole other kettle of fish. Or a whole other tapas). The material components will be represented by the internal flag, which will be decremented each time a relevant spell is cast.

When the pouch is 'exhausted' of material components, it will not disappear, as it still holds the foci for other spells, but obviously spells requiring material components can't be cast. If the pouch is stolen or otherwise removed, then the player will not be able to cast anything requiring a material component or focus.

Most importantly, I have decided the pouch will not just hold foci: it will hold anything weighing =< 1 pound. So it can't be abused as a de facto bag of holding, but will be a great place to keep weird crap like letters, gems etc found during the adventure that might otherwise clog up the inventory.

- Material Components: Material components can be found during play. If they are placed into the pouch, they disappear and the pouch's internal flag increments by one. Players may wish not to place them in the pouch: 25gp of ruby dust may simply be sold for 25gp (- Appraise failure).

If a player already has a pouch and he buys a second one, then the existing pouch gets an extra 20 material components. If he finds one on a dead wizard, he gets a random number of additional material components (incremented to his existing pouch) and the wizard may also have a foci for some higher level spell, such as would not occur in the standard spell components pouch described in the SRD. If one of those gets put into the pouch, it can live there and will trigger another internal flag (for various reasons again relating to scripts accessing the pouch) that will be accessed when you cast the spell and it goes looking for whether you have the necessary foci. Or you can just keep it in your inventory.

- Metamagic Components: I've done a bit of research on these, there are quite a lot out there - Unearthed Arcana has lots of course, but the Book of Exalted Deeds and the Book of Vile Darkness also discuss them. There seems no reason we can't have them (though we can't have all of them, pretty much just the empowering or maximising ones. But they're the ones that matter ). Also they will take a step toward adding value to high-level spell-casters, who currently lack Rings of Wizardry, Spell Turning, Spell Storing, and many of the higher level spells and items that high-level spell-caster would have. Best of all, enemies wil be able to use them against you! :zap:

Usage of metamagic components will be simple: you keep them in your pouch. The spell will check for them in your inventory. So to use them for a specific spell, you take them out of the pouch and put them in your inventory before casting, and to avoid using them on a spell you don't want metamagicked (to avoid wasting them) just keep them in the pouch. This will mean you can't yank them out in the heat of battle, but I can live with that.

- Completion: This mod is on the backburner until I have finished the KotB patch and then some other priorities for the Co8 patch. but some of the ground work has been done: I have already added 20 material components to the KotB protos.tab, which can easily be moved across to ToEE if desired. Here's a pic of the little buggers - piles of mica, iron filings, grave dirt, lime, salt, soot, sulphur, all sorts of stuff. They actually mark my first attempt at making new remeshed models from scratch (albeit all I had to do was dig out the relevant .tga file and re-colour it, then add new .skm / .ska files etc).

 

I did an update post on this but it became so rambling and hugely long I transfered it to my blog.